Ken said last month: “No journalist has contacted my accountant to ask anything about my tax arrangements. I’d be quite happy for them to do so.” So we called his accountant and he wasn’t happy to speak to us at all…

We called Ken’s accountant Peter Auguste to ask him why if he had signed off Ken’s released tax declaration as Team Ken claims, he had not put his name to the document? He refused to confirm he had in fact signed off the declaration. A week after Ken released his figures they then changed on his website. We think Ken was lying and that the figures were not in fact signed off by his accountant, who would not have got them wrong when by law they were signed off and sworn to be true in his annual returns to HMRC.

All of sudden Ken’s claimed income had risen from £164,055 to £205,800 and his tax paid from £113,861 to £131,606. Mysterious.

This might have something to do with the fact that – as he’s admitted to the Standard – he “forgot” to include in his declaration a “resettlement grant” he got from the GLA when he lost the mayoralty. But that resettlement grant was £71,000 – so even Ken’s new figures don’t seem to add up. So a simple question for Ken tonight. Were his released figures really produced by his accountant or by his campaign?

His accountant has refused to confirm to us he signed them off. There is no signature or letterhead on the released figures and the document properties appears to show that it was produced by Mark Watts. Watts is the name of Ken Livingstone’s former advisor whilst Mayor who joined his Parliamentary staff in 1999 and now works as a “Climate Change advisor”. Not an accountant…